Starting a blog for your company is a lucrative way to showcase your expertise and expand your audience. We’ve talked about it before here on our blog, and it’s something that we emphasize because we feel it’s a great opportunity for business owners to market their services and reach more people.

However, you need to ensure you’re using your blog in the most effective way possible by doing several things in order to maximize your posts. We’ll go over a few things today that will help you get the most you can out of each blog post.

Choose your topics carefully

Before you start blogging, you need to make sure you have determined who your audience is. If you don’t know who you’re writing for, you won’t be able to write for them. After you have your audience in mind, think about topics that might appeal to them. As a company, you’ll probably want to gear your blog toward your customers and blog about things that will be helpful for them, by answering questions they regularly ask you, or solve issues that seem to plague that group of people.

Think about SEO

Your audience is your most important group to think about, they will be the ones using your site, sharing it, and hopefully doing business with you because of it. However, you do want to think about Search Engine Optimization and what you can do to maximize your posts for search engines so you will be found easier. As a design company, we blog about things that are relevant to our business, web design, logos, social media, blogging, etc. Search engines crawl the words on your blog and help you to be found for different keywords that pertain to your line of business. If you keep this in mind when choosing topics, you can gear your posts toward the most important topics for your company to be found.

Craft great headlines

People are more likely to read articles with funny, interesting, descriptive, or relevant headlines. Use a little creativity and come up with headlines that fit your company and your audience but are also interesting enough to intrigue your audience to read it.

Use images

Imagery helps to add some interest to your articles. It’s easy and cheap to add images (visit http://sxc.hu for free images) and people enjoy having something to look at. Many times an image will be the thing that entices me to read a blog post, because it looks fun and I want to see what the post is all about. Especially if you have long posts with lots of text, its a good idea to use at least 1 image to add some graphic value to your article. Images are also a good way to illustrate the idea that you’re blogging about. If people will understand the concept better with an image, then you should certainly use one!

Format your text

There are several tools included with WordPress and other blogging platforms that make formatting your text very simple. Headlines are a great way to break up your text and allow people to easily scan your articles to see if they want to read more. WordPress allows you to use Headlines 1-6, with the higher numbers being bigger and more prominent. Bullet points are another formatting option, and another great way to break up large text blocks. You can also italicize and bold important items so they stand out adequately.

Plan ahead

My biggest piece of advice for new or seasoned bloggers, is to plan ahead. Make a list of article ideas so that when you sit down to write a blog post, you have some ideas in mind and don’t sit there with a blank screen. I am constantly thinking of blog ideas and try to write down at least 1 new idea per week. If a client asks me a question and I think others might like to know the answer as well, I make a note of it and write a post so everyone can benefit from it.

Blogging can be really fun even if you don’t consider yourself a writer. You know your business well and can offer beneficial advice and helpful resources to your clients, which is really what a company blog is all about. Start slow if you like, but make sure you’re blogging effectively, so you can get the most amount of power from your blog possible.